Many people will have an event or happening that stood out for them in 2022. I pick two as some of the most significant, and that we are likely witnessing how the stuff of history is made. The war in Ukraine will likely be remembered as one of the most significant events of 2022. It has entrenched the geopolitical reality that even a seemly pointless and brutal war has its supporters and opposers, including in Africa as elsewhere around the world. Africa’s perennial conflicts aside, the war has only deepened disappointments in the United Nations Organisation’s promise to ensure a tranquil and prosperous world order. And, as a wakeup call coming 30 years after the Cold War supposedly ended, it has shattered complacent assumptions of peace and stability, particularly in Europe and the rich democracies. But no one anywhere in the world has been left unscathed. The war has unleashed global inflation and the high cost of living we are currently experiencing. And this at a time our economies are trying to recover from damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic The war that has been termed of choice by a nuclear-armed aggressor grinds on, but so is the scramble that, after this crisis, a similar one may never happen again. The world nonetheless remains vulnerable rogue countries and whichever way out, history is being made before our eyes. The war seems to have accelerated a rethink of global assumptions on world peace and stability, perhaps setting the stage for an overhaul of the UN beginning with the Security Council and the veto power the Permanent Members wield. Each of the five UN Security Council members – France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, China, and the United States – has a veto over all UN sanctions and all UN peacekeeping operations. This is untenable as the Ukraine war amply demonstrates with the seeming helplessness to decisively act against it. 2022 will likely also be remembered as the year a prototype of the ChatGPT came to world attention. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, and the new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has not left the news since its launch this past November. It has startling capabilities. It is the next thing after Google search which, when searching for something, dishes up internet links to what you are looking for. It however turns out that previous researchers in a similar project at Google have had a hand in developing ChatGPT, now showing us what the next level looks like. The bot’s website is free to try. If you master it, you’ll discover that it can explain concepts, write reports and generate ideas from scratch creating new content, including business strategies, blog topics. It can also compose emails and essays, and even write computer code. All you have to do is key in a simple request of what you want it to do. Within the first week of launch on 30th November, for example, an adventurous writer used the chatbot together with a similar tool to make a children’s book complete with AI-generated pictures, “printed it, and started selling it on Amazon without ever picking up a pen and paper.” It took him just a couple of days. The real test however is in the technology’s believability and has passed the test. One research decided to see if people could tell the difference between the bot’s writing a fourth-grade essay and a child writing it. It asked experts on children’s writing if they could spot the difference. None of them could. Understandably, educators are concerned about what the bot means in classroom cheating. Likewise, professionals in some writing-related professions, including journalists if you look at examples of LinkedIn posts written using ChatGPT. One can see why knowledge professionals including journalists have been wondering what the AI bot means for the security of their jobs. What we can be certain of is that knowledge workplaces will need to begin wrestling with the impact of generative AI in 2023. The only thing holding it, allaying fears of losing jobs, for now, is that the technology remains a dumb machine that cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction. It is also open to abuse it is based on analysing huge amounts of data that carry within them our discriminative biases such as against women and can generate toxic language, including hate speech. These are ills to guard against, which the UN cultural and education agency, UNESCO, has developed global standards on the ethics of artificial intelligence. Its recommendations were adopted by UNESCO’s 193 Member States in November 2021. What remains, however, is for the states to develop legal regimes to regulate and anticipate the pitfalls of Generative AI.
